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Mapping fun with GeoRSS and geo-discovery

Bruce — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 00:26:26 +0000

Continuing the recent geo-fixation trend evident on this site, this article shares the results of a slightly deeper delve into GeoRSS and looks at a great browser add-on that offers auto-discovery of geotagged content in webpages and in some feeds. What is GeoRSS? Wikipedia describes GeoRSS as "an emerging standard for encoding location as part of an RSS feed." It also encodes location in Atom feeds, and rather than the singular "standard" there are actually two variations (GeoRSS-Simple and the more advanced GeoRSS-GML). A third encoding, W3C Basic Geo, is depreciated but still in use (e.g. by Flickr; see below). I happen to use the Geo Mashup plugin for WordPress to geotag articles on this site. As well as adding appropriate metadata tags into the head of location-specific posts, the plugin automatically adds GeoRSS-Simple encoding to my feeds. The GeoRSS-Simple feeds are identified with this namespace declaration in the header: xmlns:georss="http://www.georss.org/georss" Each item in the feed will be marked-up with a coordinate pair separated by a whitespace and enclosed in a point tag. For example: 50.185676 8.464943 And that's it. So what can you do with it? GeoRSS in your blog feed In WordPress you can create a feed for any category or any tag just by putting /feed/ at the end of the URL. This is ideal if you have a dedicated category or tag for geotagged content. In my case I had geotagged content spanning several categories, so I decided to go back and add the tag "geotag" to all my geotagged articles across all categories. This ...

An ABC of geotagging photos on the Mac

Bruce — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 19:30:54 +0000

From bioneural.net:

This article considers geotagging photos from a Mac perspective, looking at automatic and manual methods, and explaining terms such as data loggers, track points, waypoints, and routes. It lists OS X software options for connecting to data loggers, converting track log formats, geo-locating photos, and writing that data to EXIF for both raw and JPEG images. It also covers the importance of time synchronization, what you can do with geotagged photos, workflow, choosing a data logger and controlling it from your Mac. Introduction With my blog articles geotagged and mapped, and the launch of geotagicons.com behind me, the next challenge was to consider geotagging my photos in future. Some time ago I blogged about doing this in iPhoto, and although workable for a small selection of images this manual/ best guess option doesn't scale well to 2-3 week vacations when you return with several hundred images and a poor recollection of what was taken exactly where. Before getting started on something (i.e. spending money!) I like to try and gain a reasonable overview of what I'm about to get into. What follows is a summary of my research into the terminology, technology, hardware and software that a budding Mac photo geotagger will want to get to grips with. If you also like to look before you leap then this article may be of service to you. Although written with fellow Mac users in mind, if you're afflicted with Windows much of the article is still relevant. What is geotagging? In a photographic context, geotagging ...

A web standard icon for geotagging

Bruce — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 13:35:39 +0000

From bioneural.net:

Geotagging (or geocoding if you prefer) is the act of associating your content (blog posts, photos, feeds, etc.) with a geographic location (e.g. via latitude and longitude co-ordinates). Thus tagged authors can "mash" their content together with the likes of Google Maps, or the Flickr Map if photography is your thing. However, co-ordinates are typically encoded within metadata (or microformat) tags making them visible to machines but hidden from people. We have de facto web standard icons to help identify feeds, OPML, and sharing—so why not for geotagged content? Update 29.02.08: Thanks to everyone who gave feedback or otherwise contributed to the process of taking this proposal forward. Comments are now closed and further feedback should now be directed to geotagicons.com, where you can now download the new community-designed geotag icon. The goods I propose a web standard Geotag Icon, to be used freely by any geotagger or geotagging service. Here is what it looks like at 128px: At 32px: And at 16px: Important: These images are not final; this is a proposal. Please do not hotlink to these images. You can download them individually by right-clicking the one you want, or as part of the draft Geotag Icon Development Kit here. Family line-up The family resemblance is obvious: Why not complete the set? Grab the Feed icon, the OPML icon, and the Open Share icon. Update 27.03.08: The Open Share Icon Project offers a free, open, community-driven alternative to the trademarked and brand-linked ShareThis.com icon. Icon specification It should be similar in style to existing de facto web standard icons (hereafter ...

Blogging with ecto: big on features

Bruce — Sat, 31 Dec 2005 20:16:24 +0000

From bioneural.net:

This blog is published using the iBlog client, an easy-to-use OS X application that makes uploading static pages to the .Mac server simple. iBlog version 1.x has been around for a few years now and despite a number of updates its basic feature set has remained relatively static. However, version 2.x is now in development and promises to add some of the features requested by users in the small but friendly community Forum. Mac fans can now choose from an increasing range of blogging software, and here I take a quick look at ecto, a seemingly popular and well-regarded client. This article refers to iBlog (version 1.x), a Mac blogging client that was formerly used to publish this site. It may refer to design elements and other features that have since been replaced. Ecto is described as: a feature-rich desktop blogging client for MacOSX and Windows, supporting a wide range of weblog systems, such as Blogger, Blojsom, Drupal, MovableType, Nucleus, TypePad, WordPress, and more. This software is far from a gooy mess (as in ectoplasm... sorry) but not perfect, and in some ways overly complex. I was unable to get iPhoto or iTunes integration working (I tried version 2.4.1 with a Blogger account). I want to highlight some of the things that work well from the point-of-view of an iBlog user with a "version 2.x wish list" in mind! Do you prefer plain or RTF? iBlog 1.x uses and RTF editor which is responsible for introducing spurious code that has thus far prevented this blog from ...

Tagophilia: the game of tag (as played with iBlog)

Bruce — Sun, 24 Apr 2005 10:44:41 +0000

From bioneural.net:

Tag—you're it! The game of "Tag" has always been popular, and now people who played it as children are reliving their misspent youth on the web by tagging everything in sight. Flickr lets members tag their photos with keywords. Technorati lets bloggers use their entry categories as tags. The "social bookmarking" service del.icio.us uses tags to classify and group shared bookmarks. In each case such "related" tags serve to offer the reader the option to find "more like this", whether it be a photo or an article. iBlog users can get in on the act too... This article refers to iBlog (version 1.x), a Mac blogging client that was formerly used to publish this site. It may refer to design elements and other features that have since been replaced. Flickr, Technorati, and del.icio.us weight tags according to how many times they appear in their database: try it out here, here, and here. As Technorati explain "The size of the tag indicates how full of goodies it is." What was I saying about children? But tags don't have to relate to something vaguely related. They can also be used to link to something very specific, such as an article in Wikipedia. I decided to add what I call a "Tagophilia bar" to my postings (as in "tags indicating affiliated things—and for the love of it", get it?). I think this is a development to keep an eye on, and something that will no doubt evolve as more and more people and services become "tag aware". ...

Rotate displayed photos within your blog

Bruce — Thu, 17 Mar 2005 19:27:50 +0000

From bioneural.net:

If you use a tool like iBlog that produces static web pages for upload, you can't utilize server-side scripts to rotate images on your blog. The easiest solution I've come across to date, Flickr is nearly perfect for the job... The photo sharing service Flickr will let you incorporate recent or random photos from your Flickr account into a web page (such as your blog). Free accounts come with a 10 MB per month bandwidth cap. As they explain: Creating a Flickr badge is a great way to show some of your photos on another website. The photos used for your badge are picked from whatever is in your photostream (that means photos that were uploaded by you). This simple form will generate the code you need to copy and paste into your external website. The form is indeed simple, but still gives you control over options including the number of photos to display, photo size, and styling. Here is an example result: You can either edit the CSS within the included JavaScript, or do your own styling: flickr_badge_background_color = "#000000"; flickr_badge_border = "1px solid #000000"; flickr_badge_width = "120px"; flickr_badge_text_font = "11px Arial, Helvetica, Sans serif"; flickr_badge_image_border = "1px solid #ffffff"; flickr_badge_link_color = "#ffffff"; Rather than use the Flickr upload page to get your images online, Mac users might prefer to export them to Flickr directly from iPhoto using the FlickrExport plugin. FlickrExport has a number of "value added" features like batch resizing: Flickr additionally offers RSS and Atom feeds for your photos (the feed links are at the bottom of the ...